Shaping things to come: seeking to impose their global vision of a tyrannical "utopia," powerful elitists have effectively used science fiction to evangelize for their cause.
Between 1890 and 1920, Herbert George "H.G." Wells was arguably the most influential popular writer in the English language, producing a series of "modern fairy tales." By penning such works as The Invisible Man, The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, The First Men in the Moon, Food of the Gods, and The Island of Dr. Moreau, Wells essentially created the modern genre known as science fiction -- speculative works anticipating future trends or examining the impact of technology on humanity.But Wells did more than spin fantastic tales. He was a devoted Marxist and a committed globalist who used his fiction to propagandize on behalf of an ideal world state ruled by an all-powerful technocratic elite, sometimes referred to by him as the "Samurai." Woven into his novels were familiar 19th-century socialist and utopian themes: class conflict; the supposed eclipse of religion by science; the purported benefits of eugenics and social engineering; "free love"; and the ultimate emergence of a world state. Unlike varieties of literature in which art imitates life, science fiction is used to mold perceptions of the future -- and can thus be used by the likes of Wells to try to make life imitate art. Through his use of sci-fi to propagate socialist and globalist themes, Wells was able to achieve that kind of influence.
"Thinking people who were born about the beginning of this century are in some sense Wells' own creation," wrote George Orwell in 1941. Science fiction is often called "the literature of ideas." Science fiction has become an effective means of evangelizing on behalf of the supposedly inevitable post-Christian, globalist social order.
Globalism or Destruction
Sci-fi typically depicts the future as some variation on the theme of a collectivist global regime from which religion and the traditional family have been banished. In this view, mankind is not made up of free individuals created in the image of God, but soulless, evolving organic machines suited to life in a regimented society. The only alternative to such a utopian global order is apocalyptic destruction -- through war or environmental collapse -- and reversion to barbarism. This grim projection has provided fodder for numerous science fiction stories, particularly on the movie screen:
* Soylent Green depicted an overpopulated, resource-depleted Earth in which humanity was driven to systematized cannibalism.
* Planet of the Apes portrayed a post-apocalyptic world overrun by intelligent simians following a nuclear war. The original film's "shock" ending involving the Statue of Liberty is a twist typical of The Twilight Zone's Rod Serling, who reworked the script. Serling, a talented writer, was an outspoken humanist and advocate of nuclear disarmament.
* Arnold Schwarzenegger's Terminator movies also posit a future blighted by the results of a global thermonuclear war -- in this case, one started by intelligent machines that rebel against their human creators.
* The Mad Max films that ignited Mel Gibson's action hero career are set in a chaotic world where gangs of motorized marauders menace tiny colonies of civilized people.
* In the Kevin Costner vehicle Waterworld, runaway "global warming" causes the earth's polar ice caps to melt, triggering a deluge that wipes out industrial civilization.
The vision of a world demolished by overpopulation and environmental collapse has become so deeply embedded in the popular mind that it serves as kind of rhetorical shorthand for global government advocates. Witness the remarks of globalist media magnate Ted Turner at a November 30, 1999 4-H convention in Atlanta. Addressing the purported need for global population control and wealth redistribution through the UN, Turner declared: "We have to work very fast to stabilize our population and protect our environment. What's left of the natural world is under tremendous pressure." According to an account in the Daily Oklahoman, Turner warned the students that the only alternative to a UN-dominated world would be a future "exactly like the movie Road Warrior," the first of Mel Gibson's Mad Max films.
Decades before the antics of Gibson, Costner, Schwarzenegger and their like reached the silver screen, H.G. Wells devised the basic template for the apocalyptic science fiction story. Wells' career as a novelist began shortly before the advent of motion pictures, and many of his earliest stories have made the transition to the screen, some of them more than once. (The most recent version of The Time Machine, directed by Wells' grandson, Simon Wells, debuted earlier this year.) During his lifetime a half-dozen of his books were adapted as films, most significantly Things To Come (1935), which Wells adapted for the screen from his 1933 novel The Shape of Things to Come.
Things To Come was the grand progenitor of all post-apocalyptic science fiction movies. Wells' 1933 novel was one of several in which the author displayed an eerie prescience: Written the year that the National Socialists (Nazis) came to power in Germany, The Shape of Things to Come foretold a world war, triggered by a clash between England and Germany, that ended with the use of atomic weapons.
In the story by Wells, the world war, arid the plagues that come in its wake, demolish human society. Barbarian kingdoms arise that engage in endless small wars. Behind the scenes, an elite corps of scientists creates a world authority called Wings Over the World (WOW), which claims a mandate to create a World State. Equipped with a vast and incredibly sophisticated air force, WOW issues ultimatums to the warring tribal chieftains: Lay down your weapons and submit to the "new order," or WOW aircraft will mercilessly barrage your country with bombs carrying "peace gas" warheads. By story's end, a technocratic elite has seized global control and purged humanity of its unscientific loyalties -- such as attachments to family, religion, and independent nations.
A Totalitarian Vision
Things To Come dramatized the totalitarian vision Wells had described in several of his earlier nonfiction works. In 1901, Wells capitalized on his commercial success by publishing Anticipations, a political manifesto describing a global utopia called the "New Republic," ruled by "an unprecedented sort of people."
The central theme of Anticipations, writes Wells' biographer Michael Coren, "was that one part of the world's population would benefit by killing or enslaving the rest. Civil, economic and political freedom would be severely limited and controlled; racial and social homogeneity would be enforced; the omnipotent state would, by a combination of education and social engineering, produce a world of content and obedient citizens."
"The lascivious and the lazy, the dark-skinned and the dreamers, the rebels and the religious, the unstable and the unhappy, and all who do not fit deftly into the eye of Wells' needle would be put to death," continues Coren. Such people, Wells explained, live "only on sufferance, out of pity and patience, and on the understanding that they do not propagate; and I do not foresee any reason to suppose that they [the rulers] will hesitate to kill when that sufferance is abused." Those among the ruling elite who scruple at the wholesale murder of "inferior" human beings will be admonished that there is an "ideal that will make killing worth the while," according to Wells.
Four years later Wells published A Modern Utopia, elaborating on his totalitarian design. The latter book envisioned separating human society into five classes: The Samurai, or ruling elite; the Poietics, or people of letters and imagination; the Kinetic or practical class, capable people responsible for doing the work of industrial society; the "Dull," who would "gravitate towards and below the minimum wage that qualifies for marriage"; and the "Base" -- "congenital invalids ... idiots and madmen ... drunkards and men of vicious mind of the Base, Wells wrote: "[T]he species must be engaged in eliminating them," either by leaving them at the mercy of nature, or by helping nature along through "social surgery." "A Modern Utopia is under the hard logic of life, and it would have to exterminate a race as quickly as it could," insisted Wells.
In Wells' Utopia, writes Coren:
Malformed or ill children will be murdered at birth, and any sign of decadence or distraction from social tasks will be severely punished. Procreation is prohibited from all those who work below the required limit, or are labeled as dissidents.... The proposals [include] ... uniformity of clothes, marriages decreed and supervised by the state, government control of diet and recreation.... No aspect, however small or meaningless, of human life is to be left in the hands of the individual.
Wells' prescriptions earned the admiration of Sidney and Beatrice Webb, who in 1889 had founded the Fabian Society in England. Marxists who preferred to seize power through subversion rather than revolutionary violence, the Webbs were favorably impressed with Wells' rationale for a society built on genocide. "I have been absolutely overwhelmed by the sheer intellectual vigor [of Anticipations]," wrote Sidney to Wells in 1901. Beatrice gushed that the book was filled with "luminous hypotheses ... the most remarkable book of the year."
At the Webbs' invitation, Wells joined the Fabian Circle in 1902. At the time, the Fabian movement's American society included another science fiction author, Boston novelist Edward Bellamy, whose influence on this country was comparable to that exercised in Great Britain by Wells.
Looking Backward
In 1888, the year before the Webbs created the Fabian movement, Bellamy published Looking Backward: 2000-1887, which would eventually outsell every 19th-century American novel except Uncle Tom's Cabin. Describing the experience of Julian West, a wealthy Bostonian who lapses into a coma and wakes in the year 2000, Bellamy's novel invented what would become a familiar science fiction trope: a contemporary man miraculously transported into a utopian future.
Under the tutelage of the kindly Dr. Leete and his daughter Edith, West learns that an egalitarian "cooperative" order has replaced the free market and competition. The state owns all property and allots a portion of it to its subjects by means of "credit cards." In keeping with The Communist Manifesto, every man was required to "serve the nation for a fixed period" as a member of an "industrial army." "No man any more has any care for the morrow, either for himself or his children, for the nation guarantees the nurture, education, and comfortable maintenance of every citizen from the cradle to the grave' boasts Dr. Leete. West's guide to this new world also explains that "the great nations of Europe as well as Australia, Mexico, and parts of South America, are now organized industrially like the United States," and there exists "a loose form of federal union of world-wide extent."
In 1890, Bellamy published Equality, a sequel intended to tie up some of Looking Backward's loose ends, the most conspicuous of which was this question: What happens to those who resist the benevolent new order? Not surprisingly, Bellamy's answer was similar to the one offered by Wells: Dissenters are regarded as sick or insane, and are subject to confinement on "reservations" -- for their own good, of course, as well as that of the new society. In such fashion did the chief American "popularizer" of socialism anticipate the gulag.
Although various utopian and collectivist experiments had previously disfigured American society, it wasn't until Bellamy's Looking Backward that socialism became a serious social movement. According to Marxist commentator Laurence Gronlund, "as late as 1880 [one] could count all the native American Socialists on the fingers of one hand." Looking Backward "brought socialism up from the workshops and beer-gardens into the libraries and drawing rooms," states social commentator Harry Thurston Peck. In 1898, the Social Democratic Party passed a resolution commending Bellamy, noting that "no more effective work had been done for socialism in the United States than that [done] by Bellamy."
By 1890, Looking Backward had sold more than 200,000 copies and was selling more than 10,000 copies a week. The success of Bellamy's novel had much more to do with his prowess as an organizer than his skill as a storyteller. Within a few years of publishing his first book, Bellamy had organized a network of 165 "Nationalist" clubs across the country to agitate on behalf of his vision, which he described as "the next stage in the industrial and social development of humanity." Historian John W. Baer notes that by 1891, Bellamy's Nationalist movement, along with the Society of Christian Socialists, had developed formal institutional links with Britain's Fabian Socialist movement. The Fabian movement was a major element of what Wells called (in a book by the same title) "The Open Conspiracy" to rule the world.
Fabian conspirators on both sides of the Atlantic seeded their members in key positions of influence, and increased their leverage by luring policymakers into accepting important aspects of their program. In her book The Story of Fabian Socialism, British Fabian Margaret Cole described this strategy as " 'honeycombing,' converting either to Socialism or to parts of the immediate Fabian Programme ... key persons, or groups of persons, who were in a position either to take action themselves or to influence others...." "It was not necessary," Cole pointed out, "that these 'key persons' should be members of the Fabian Society; often it was well they should not; what was essential was that they should at first or even second-hand be instructed or advised by Fabians."
In this way, the Fabians -- following a strategy similar to that later outlined by Italian Communist theoretician Antonio Gramsci -- could achieve the permeation of society by their ideas. By carefully following this approach, boasted Cole, the Fabians could seduce an entire nation to "pass into collective control without there ever having been a party definitely and openly pledged to that end."
Permeation via Entertainment
The most effective forms of indoctrination are those insinuated into entertainment -- literature, films, music, and television. Science fiction dominates contemporary entertainment: Half of the 20 top-grossing films are from the sci-fi genre, and each summer movie season brings a fresh crop of sci-fi blockbusters. Sci-fi dominates the market for paperback books, which isn't surprising: That format was created partly as a vehicle for authors such as Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury, who had previously written for "pulp" sci-fi periodicals like Astounding Stories. And, of course, television has made science fiction a pervasive cultural presence. Given science fiction's influence, it shouldn't surprise us that it is frequently exploited to promote themes favored by Fabian agents of cultural permeation.
The most obvious example is provided by the Star Trek phenomenon, which for three decades has been the dominant "global myth," according to cultural commentator Jeff Greenwald. In his book Future Perfect: How Star Trek Conquered Planet Earth, Greenwald describes that myth as "a wildly optimistic view of humanity's future," with Earth becoming "truly a global village.... Poverty has been eradicated, racism is dead, and nobody breathes secondhand smoke. Money no longer exists, and Earthlings don't squabble or bicker; even organized religion is a thing of the past." That last point is central to the Star Trek universe: The program's creator, Gene Roddenberry, was a militant secularist honored by the American Humanist Association for his crusade against religion. Although the humanist and globalist elements of the Star Trek concept were relatively muted in the original program (which ran from 1966-1969), Roddenberry won a small victory for Humanism: He decreed that his fictional starship Enterprise would not have a ship's chaplain.
Star Trek spawned five television series, nine films (with a tenth due to arrive in December), hundreds of novels, and a cultlike following reminiscent of Edward Bellamy's "Nationalist" movement. Like Bellamy, Roddenberry networked skillfully, and his creation's success is largely due to his recruitment in the 1960s of influential science fiction authors -- Asimov, Bradbury, Theodore Sturgeon, Norman Spinrad, Harlan Ellison, and numerous others -- to promote the show as a means of making sci-fi "respectable." These promotional efforts did much to bring about the "spontaneous" emergence of a devoted core of Star Trek fans, who in turn ensured the program's success as a vehicle for revolutionary ideas.
Edward Bellamy and H.G. Wells would probably approve of the future depicted by Roddenberry (who claimed that many of his ideas came from the elitist Rand Corporation think-tank). Earth, in the futuristic setting of Star Trek, is subject to a single world government (Australia, the final holdout, succumbed sometime in the 22nd century) that is a constituent of the "United Federation of Planets," a galactic body patterned after the UN.
In his 1968 book The Making of Star Trek, author Stephen Whitfield noted that Desilu Studios, which produced the original series, wanted the starship featured in it to be an American vessel. Roddenberry insisted that the ship would represent humanity under a global government. "He believed that a peaceful, harmonious, unified earth must be the result of a natural and logical evolution of society, if society is to survive," observed Whitfield. "This approach expresses the message' basic to the series: We must learn to live together or most certainly we will soon all die together," declared Roddenberry. The missing third alternative, of course, is that humanity can peacefully exist as a world of independent free nations that cooperate through mutually beneficial commerce -- a vision ignored by Roddenberry and other sci-fi globalists.
The Federation is headquartered in San Francisco (the UN's founding city) and boasts an insignia adapted from the familiar UN seal. In all of its incarnations, Star Trek sermonizes about mankind's "wisdom" in creating a global political system to prevent self-immolation through nuclear war. It's reasonable to believe that this familiar staple of UN propaganda has found favor with literally tens of millions worldwide at least in part because of the influence of Star Trek.
Star Trek also persistently promotes the Marxist theme that "capitalism" represents a passing phase in the development of the means of production, destined for obsolescence as human sophistication and knowledge increase. In Star Trek: The Next Generation, a sequel series that ran from 1987 to 1994 (and has since graduated to the big screen), Captain Jean-Luc Picard offered several lectures about the foolishness of capitalism. "We've grown out of our infancy," Picard sneers at a displaced 20th-century investment broker in one episode. "We have eliminated hunger, want, the need for possessions.
In the 1996 theatrical release Star Trek: First Contact, Picard delivers a similar homily to an inhabitant of the 21st century: "The economics of the future are different. Money doesn't exist in the 24th Century.... The acquisition of wealth is no longer a driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity." Picard never explains the revolution in human nature that made such a society possible.
Theosophy and Doomsday
Where Star Trek evangelizes on behalf of globalist humanism, the Star Wars films celebrate what could be called a form of cosmic pantheism. Roddenberry populated his God-less fictional universe with a variety of god-like aliens. Star Wars creator George Lucas conjured up a universe devoid of deity, but permeated with a mystical, omnipotent quantity called "The Force," operating through genetically superior adepts called Jedi Knights.
This sophomoric mysticism owes a great deal to the influence of the Theosophical Society, founded in 1875 to promote the abolition of monotheism (particularly Christianity). Like Wells and Bellamy, Anne Besant, who succeeded Society founder Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, was attached to the Fabian network. The Theosophist-inspired Lucifer Publishing Company (subsequently re-named the Lucis Trust) is a major fountainhead of the modern New Age movement -- and Lucas' Star Wars films traffic tirelessly in New Age nostrums.
Except for its introduction of "The Force," the first Star Wars film was little more than a "space western." The film's all-American hero is named Luke Skywalker -- an interesting choice, given that Theosophical Society founder Blavatsky taught each of her disciples that he should aspire to become a "Walker of the sky." As the films progress, Skywalker learns that the saga's Lucifer figure -- the fallen Jedi Knight Darth Vader -- is really his father. In the more recent films (The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones), Lucas' character Anakin Skywalker, the child who would become Vader, was the result of a virgin birth.
This confounding of roles between Satan and Christ appears derivative of Blavatsky's 1877 book Isis Unveiled, supposedly dictated to the author by a host of "ascended masters." In that book, Blavatsky declared: "The Great Serpent of the Garden of Eden and the 'Lord God' are identical." Lucas' creation, Darth Vader, seems to embody this blasphemous concept. Given the ubiquity of Star Wars, and the seriousness with which it is treated as a "modern myth" (an idea promoted tirelessly by the late Joseph Campbell), it is likely that Lucas' lucrative franchise has dramatically affected the religious and philosophical views of the public at large.
Another familiar sci-fi concept is the eschatological idea that an alien encounter will forever change humanity -- whether in the form of a peaceful contact by superior aliens (e.g., 2001: A Space Odyssey, 2010: The Year We Make Contact, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and The Day the Earth Stood Still), an alien invasion, or a cosmic disaster. Embedded in this concept is the hidden corollary that there will be one voice, such as a world government or a scientific elite, representing a united world; hence the cliche of alien visitors telling humans to "Take us to your leader."
There are many sci-fi authors, both past and present, who have skillfully used this literary vehicle to anticipate genuine human progress. Jules Verne's writings describing submarines and lunar exploration were genuinely visionary. Arthur C. Clarke predicted the advent of communications satellites and other commercial adaptations of space science. Both Wells and Robert Heinlein wrote presciently about atomic energy. Scores of other authors have stirred the imagination of the young, whetting within them an appetite to explore the universe.
But among the ideas transmitted through science fiction is the deadly assumption that man can perfect himself through the use of technology and applied science, thereby creating "an unprecedented sort of people" who can exercise total power over others. The political history of the 20th century documents that genocide is the distinctive science of those who rule in the name of that murderous fiction.
The Dystopian View
William Norman Grigg
Thomas Henry Huxley, an unabashed Darwinist and Marxist, was the hero and mentor of H.G. Wells. Thus it must have been a source of painful irony to Wells when Aldous Huxley, Thomas Henry's grandson, published Brave New World in 1932. The younger Huxley's novel directly rebutted to Wells' utopian science fiction writings, particularly his novel Men Like Gods.
Along with George Orwell's 1984, Aldous Huxley's novel exemplifies dystopian science fiction -- the dramatization of a nightmarish future world. Wells and other utopians believed that human weaknesses and imperfections could be eradicated through the use of sophisticated technology in the hands of an all-powerful elite. Orwell, Huxley, and other dystopians understood that technology wedded to unaccountable power amplifies human weaknesses -- resulting in terror, mass bloodshed, and despotism.
Orwell, who wrote 1984 in 1948, was able to draw on the existing examples of Soviet Russia and National Socialist Germany. Huxley's description of a totalitarian state resting on eugenics, engineered mass consumption, and the manipulation of sensory pleasure (particularly sex and drugs) was a prescient critique of the statist consumer culture that has emerged in the United States. But both of these visionaries are indebted to a relatively little-known novel entitled We by all-but-forgotten Soviet novelist Yevgeny Zamyatin.
A writer and engineer of leftist, bent, Zamyatin wrote We in 1921, when the Communist "scientific dictatorship" in Russia was in its infancy. The story described a futuristic post-revolutionary world from which all individualism, creativity, and imagination had been banished in the name of "genuine happiness" -- that is, submission to the One State and its ruling Benefactor. People no longer have names, but numerical designations. Anonymous secret police called "Guardians" enforce order and protect "our unfreedom -- that is, our happiness."
The book takes the form of a journal kept by D-503, the designer of a spacecraft called the Integral, through which the rulers of the One State intend "to subjugate the unknown beings on other planets, who may still be living in the primitive condition of freedom, to the beneficent yoke of reason. If they fail to understand that we bring them mathematically infallible happiness, it will be our duty to compel them to be happy."
Like the other inhabitants of the One State, D-503 lives a life of rational "happiness" -- performing his assigned tasks, dutifully reading the One State Gazette, regularly singing the "Hymn of the One State," and copulating with 0-90, the female assigned to him by the One State. But odd dreams trouble his sleep; during his waking hours, illicit desires for a different life plague him; and he finds himself succumbing to the possessive, anti-collectivist impulse of romantic love.
Consulting with the One State's physicians, D-503 is given a grave diagnosis: "You're in a bad way! Apparently, you've developed a soul." Not only is this condition "incurable," but it's also highly contagious, and calls for the most drastic treatment: "... we must cut out imagination.... Extirpate imagination. Nothing but surgery, nothing but surgery will do In short order the One State commands all of its subjects to undergo a procedure intended to remove a portion of the brain called "pons Varolii." After this operation, the One State explains, "you [will be] cured of imagination. You are perfect. You are machinelike. The road to one hundred percent happiness is free.... Hurry to the auditoriums, where the Great Operation is being performed. Long live the Great Operation! Long live the One State! Long live the Benefactor!"
We is stunningly prophetic, not merely in its grand themes -- such as the militaristic and expansionist nature of Communism, or the use of mass propaganda and enforced conformity -- but also in some striking details. Just as Vladimir Lenin's embalmed corpse remains on display at Red Square, the mummified remains of "the One," the founder of the One State, are eternally on display at "Cube Plaza." D-503 reflects that while the ancients believed God resided in heaven, inhabitants of the One State knew that space contains "only a crystal-blue, naked, indecent nothing." This observation was similar to the mocking comment of Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin that he hadn't seen God during his 1960 orbital mission.
As he grapples with his emerging soul, D-503 reflects that in the scales of social justice, "We" always outweighs "I": "Is it not clear, then, that to assume that the 'I' can have some 'rights' in relation to the State is exactly like assuming that a gram can balance on the scale against a ton? Hence, the division: Rights to the ton, duties to the gram. And the natural path from nonentity to greatness is to forget that you are a gram and feel yourself instead a millionth of a ton." Stalin invoked the same reasoning when he was told that dissident Communist Karl Kautsky refused to confess various offenses against the Soviet State. "How much does the Soviet State weigh?" Stalin asked Kautsky's interrogators before dispatching them to torture Kautsky into confessing.
Zamyatin, who joined Lenin's Bolshevik faction in 1905, and later became utterly disaffected with the Communist Party, captured Communism's diabolical essence in his novel -- and Soviet authorities understood his message. Despite the author's considerable standing in the Russian literary community, he was unable to find a publisher. After the novel was read at a gathering of Russian writers in 1923, Zamyatin was subjected to a wave of violent denunciations from Party-line writers. Smuggled abroad, it was published in English in 1924, and in both Czech and Russian in 1927. Zamyatin was exiled in 1931, and died six years later, at age 53, of heart disease.
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| Author: | Grigg, William Norman |
|---|---|
| Publication: | The New American |
| Article Type: | Cover story |
| Geographic Code: | 4EUUK |
| Date: | Aug 12, 2002 |
| Words: | 4593 |
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